Joss Whedon coming back to TV for Marvel S.H.I.E.L.D. series

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Avengers and Firefly fans, rejoice! Joss Whedon is coming back to the small screen, and he's bringing the Marvel universe with him.

ABC and Marvel have confirmed that Whedon is developing a TV series spinoff from The Avengers, based around the top-secret Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) organization that recently brought Earth's Mightiest Heroes together on the big screen.

The series will technically be set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though Variety reports the storylines will be mostly "autonomous" from upcoming sequels such as Avengers 2 and Iron Man 3. That means it's unlikely that big-screen mainstays like Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow and Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye will be prominently featured on the show—but who's to say they can't pop up from time to time?

Whedon is signed on to co-write the pilot with his brother (and frequent collaborator) Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, and will stay on to help develop the broad strokes. Assuming it's picked up, Jed and Tancharoen would join Jeph Loeb and Jeffrey Bell as executive producers.

If some of those names sound familiar, they should, because virtually everyone Whedon is bringing on board has worked with him on his former TV projects Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

For us, that means all these excellent writers are going to have big budgets and a bigger platform to play with, and with some autonomy from the films, they may get a long leash to really dig in and make this a compelling series.

Hoping to capitalize on the box-office love, ABC is putting the series into production immediately—so hopefully we'll have some more details soon.

Sound off: Do you think the Marvel universe is a good fit for live-action TV?